We are proud to announce Oakland as the site of the first in a series of ten murals dedicated to the protection and conservation of water. Over the next year, we will travel through the US, and across the globe, painting murals with communities who are highly impacted in a project we have named the WATER WRITES.
We have partnered with young artists from the Visual Element Program of the East Side Arts Alliance and community organizers from Youth Together to bring out Oakland residents for the Oakland Water Writes mural project. We have hosted a series of 3 community workshops to dialogue and create a sketch about the relationship our community has with water. Staff from the Green For All Academy will provided information on the local water shed and how our community can make a positive impact on behalf of water. The youth participants will then work together to create a sketch that reflects local and global water issues and inspires a message of collective work to protect and preserve this precious resource. The students came up with some really amazing ideas!
Our collective process makes muralism accessible to everyone, regardless of artistic capacity. After approval of the image, we project the sketch onto the wall and invite the community to come out and participate in painting. Little kids, seniors, adults and youth are welcomed to help. On President’s Day Weekend we expect a diverse group of over 100 volunteers to assist with the painting of the ground level of a massive collaborative mural.
Feb. 15-18 – Buff and Sketch Wall
Feb. 19- Community Paint Party
Feb 20-25 – Artists touch up ground level and paint second story
Mid- March – Mural Unveiling Event
In Los Angeles, middle schoolers from KIPP Academy will paint about their role in water conservation and pollution. These images will be shared with community artists and organizers painting on the Navajo Reservation, and participants in Lebanon about their limited access to clean drinking water. We will work with artists in Colombia to paint their story of resistance to the privatization of their water sources. We are working with participants in the Philippines and Hawaii who will paint about the need to protect the oceans from plastics and pollution. We will paint in the Gulf of Mexico and in El Salvador with communities impacted by oil spills and corporate dumping.
Through this process of painting with some of the communities most impacted by water issues, we hope to utilize our art techniques to create a global platform to raise awareness and inspire conservation and protection of this precious resource.